Why Women Live Longer Than Men

Everywhere in the world women live longer than men - but this was not always the case. The available data from rich countries shows that women didn't live longer than men in the 19th century. What is the reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And why does this benefit increase as time passes? The evidence is limited and we're left with only some solutions. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, However, we're not sure how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.

It is known that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. However this isn't due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some are more complex. For example, there is evidence that in rich countries the female advantage increased in part because infectious diseases used to affect women disproportionately a century ago, so advances in medicine that reduced the long-term health burden from infectious diseases, especially for survivors, ended up raising women's longevity disproportionately.

Everywhere in the world women tend to live longer than men
The first chart below shows life expectancy at birth for men and women. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line - this means in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart below shows that even though women enjoy an advantage everywhere, افضل شامبو وبلسم cross-country differences could be significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men. In Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two areas stand out.

There is an upward trend. and افضل شامبو وبلسم women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is getting wider: Although the advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was very small, it has increased substantially with time.

It is possible to verify that these are applicable to other countries that have information by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.